When we research our ancestors and their families, it is all to easy to become a collector of names, dates and places. After all, we want to 'know' who they were and where they lived and when, in order to get a glimpse into what their life was like. We look for photographs of our most recent ancestors to see what they looked like. We trawl censuses, Poor Law Applications, Wills and Testaments to get some detail about their rank in society, their jobs, their financial circumstances. We discover their families, the children they had, the children they lost. We may read their obituaries and gravestones and scan their death certificates for cause of death. Through research, we can slowly start to build up a picture of them, a notion that we know 'who they were'. But something will usually elude us - we will never truly know their feelings/emotions, even if we know the key moments in their lives.
Take my grandmother, Christina, who lost her first four children and then another two in adulthood before she herself died. How can we know her pain? Did she even want to go on having children?
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Take the family and extended family of my 3 x great grandfather Alexander and his brother James - one killed, one responsible and deported to Tasmania. The brothers had been known to argue. How can we begin to imagine the emotions in those families?
Loss does not always mean death of course. What about the parents whose children decided to emigrate and never returned home again? Whether to make a better life or just in seek of adventure, the families splintered in many cases as contact was possibly lost forever. My 2 x great grandmother saw at least two of her children, James and Ann, head off to New Zealand.
And what about the families who didn't lose contact through death or distance? There will be some of the families in my tree that lost contact with close family through family disputes, perhaps over relationships, over inheritances or just differences in opinion. Just because we 'lump' parents and children, siblings etc. together on our trees does not mean they were close in real terms.
We can only learn so much about our ancestors and their families. Our descendants will have access to more about our lives than we could ever have imagined, yet our emotional lives, what makes us 'us' may well still remain hidden.
My mother had two brothers who didn't talk to each other for about 40 years. When one of them died, his wife rang us to tell the other brother. Another of her brothers was divorced so lost contact with his family too, although the children kept in touch.
ReplyDeleteThank you for reading my blog. Yes, unfortunately that is not uncommon and so was probably the same for our ancestors.
DeleteExcellent points. Thank you for this thought-provoking blog.
ReplyDeleteThank you very much for reading it.
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